[My Computational Complexity Web Log] Howdy from San Diego

This week I m at the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC), a combination of thirty conferences and workshops with 2200 participants. I m here for the

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, Jun 9, 2003

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This week I'm at the Federated Computing Research Conference (FCRC), a
combination of thirty conferences and workshops with 2200
participants. I'm here for the theory conference (STOC) and Electronic
Commerce.

Last night, Adleman, Rivest and Shamir gave their Turing award
lecture, each giving twenty minutes of an hour long talk. Their basic
them on how cryptology has changed in the last 25 years:

Cryptography is now done publicly rather than in secret. This has
led to researchers building on each others ideas to create better and
better encryption schemes and protocols. But also it has allowed more
people to attack these protocols and weed out the bad ones.

Cryptography has moved from art to science. Now we have protocols
based on mathematical ideas like number theory instead of just
creating seemingly complexity functions.

Adi Shamir made other interesting comments like that perfect
cryptography is impossible, though very good cryptography can be had
at a modest cost. Most attacks on practical implementations of
cryptographic protocols work on the implementation as opposed to the
protocol.

The lectures were taped and may show up on-line someday. I'll let you
know if I find them there--definitely recommended viewing.